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I've been trying to figure out the "point" of the Toxicologist's field vial action with a friend, and we're both stumped, so I thought I'd ask if anyone here has ideas.

To recap: for 1 action, you make a quick vial, and for 1 action you apply it to your weapon like it's an injury poison. On the next strike with that weapon before the end of your turn, you also deal the vial bomb's initial damage (no splash). In other words, you take 3 actions to do a single strike, and if it hits you do 1d6 extra damage per weapon die. If it missed the effect is lost. Since it's not an actual poison with a save, it doesn't interact with any of your other features or feats except the 1-action-to-poison and the resistance bypass.

The damage just doesn't seem good enough to make it appealing. You start with it at lv1, so it should be useful then, right? Well, it's just about better than triple-attacking with a dagger on 0 Str, sure. But the damage-per-action of double-attacking with a dagger is about the same, so it's only worth it if you've really got nothing else worth doing in your turn. And you need some reason to not just chuck a vial bomb + strike for 3 actions instead, which has better damage. Maybe it's melee, you have flanking, and don't want to splash yourself + allies?

If you have Quick Bomber, of course the damage from a triple vial bomb throw does better. (Don't think about what happens when Bomber starts using Int for splash damage...) What if you took a high-Str low-Dex build and can't throw bombs? Then you'll still do better swinging multiple times to add your Str repeatedly.

What if you spent all your vials on prebuffing, and now you want to hang back outside bomb range and snipe? If you're using a 1h crossbow, then it takes 4 actions to make the attack. This gives you 2 attacks at 0 MAP over 2 turns for 3d6, which improves over 2 attacks at 0 MAP and 1 at 5 MAP. Or, you could use a 2h crossbow and get as much or more damage from the improved die size. If you picked up bows from ancestry or archetype feats, then their triple-attack is also better DPR than one Toxi-shot.

At level 11 it upgrades to also do the bomb's splash damage as persistent damage. I.e. 1 persistent damage per die. That's nice, but then you look at the martials and realise that by this point your 3-action is doing as much damage as their 1-action. Is this damage really the best use of your actions?

(If the idea of adding d6 + persistent damage to a weapon strike for 2 actions sounds familiar, you may have seen a Magus cast Gouging Claw spellstrikes before. Only, at lv11 the Toxi is adding 2d6 + 2 while the Magus adds 7d6 + 7. Of course, I don't expect the Toxi to be outblasting the Magus, of course. But, wow.)

At level 17 you start getting a quick vial for free each turn, but that's level 17. And you can't benefit from producing quick vials during Double Brew the way a Chirurgeon or Mutagenist can, since it's too action intensive (and needs you to have a weapon in-hand to poison).

I don't need this to be amazing or anything, I'm just trying to answer, when would I ever want to use this? When would it be worth me remembering it exists? And so far I've only got the most marginal situations that don't seem worth the effort.

(I also know Mutagenist didn't get a great deal either, but at least it's got something going on with Double Brew by level 9...)

The more I dig into the new Advanced Alchemy and Versatile Vails the more problems I see. Because you don't craft AAs in batches anymore, you can't fully buff your team 24/7, not without sacrificing your max versatile vials by reapplying them every 10 mins even then you can only have 2-3 buffs. Also, there are A LOT of alchemical items with more than 10 min duration that are simply not worth the 1 out of possibly 8-16 (with 2 feats) AAs that you have:

-Antidotes, Antiplagues
-Most Contact, Inhale, Ingest Poisons
-Most Bombs (I get that there's VVs for these but some aren't worth the VVs/Action either)

If you wanted to buff your party of 4 with antiplague which lasts for 24 hours you'd need ALMOST HALF your AA supply. I get that the old infused reagents got you 60+ items per day and that's absurd but this just doesn't look sustainable.

In some ways I think this is a necessary trade-off with Alchemists getting a lot more in-the-moment flexibility. Particularly in exploration mode, where you can pull out any of your many known items at zero notice and regenerate the vial almost-instantly. Previously you might afford a couple of reagents for high-significance actions, but now you can be much more liberal in your usage, comparing to Rogues and Investigators with their large numbers of skills and skill feats they can draw upon. Spellcasters wish they had this flexibility.

Overall I think that's winning trade, but there's certainly a bunch of long-term buffing you do lose, which was previously one of those things the Alchemist was best-in-the-game at. That's not an easy change. There are also a good number of exploration mode items that just don't work with the 10 minute limit that you also won't know to prepare from your daily pool, so it's not a universal win on that front either. I don't know when I'm going to need to preserve a corpse ASAP with Timeless Salts, for example.

I think there's going to be a whole lot of existing Alchemists flicking through AoN to figure out what they can/can't do, and trying to understand the best use of their dailies. I know I'm going to be assembling a list of items that got broken by this change, at least.

(I'm not sure by what you mean by bombs that would've been worth AA reagents but not QA vials, particularly now Quick Bomber's been buffed. Either it's the best bomb you can pick in the moment or it's not, right?)

shroudb wrote:

Construct trait is not a "nerf".

While you cannot give them elixirs of health, you can Quick Repair them, and they get a host of immunities as well.

You may not like it, but it isn't a nerf.

It's instant death at 0 HP if fully applied, vs dying and wounded values that apply to PCs, normal familiars, and animal companions.

The remastered Construct trait is now flavour text, with nothing about being destroyed at 0 HP. That text is instead in Getting Knocked Out, which is in the same paragraph as talking about how most creatures die at 0 HP, and immediately followed by a paragraph about how the rules for PCs and their companions are different. So they won't instantly die, and go through the PC dying process as normal.

That said, the complaint about healing immunity is real. That takes out pretty much everything a party normally has to heal downed members, except for Administer First Aid to stabilise the familiar's dying condition. If you want to be mean, most "repair" effects also target objects only, and your familiar isn't an object. There may be some specific rules about Repairing constructs, though I haven't seen it, and it seems obvious there should be some option beyond letting it recover naturally through rest.

Otherwise, the plethora of immunities are nice, if you play in a way that puts familiars at risk. It does mess with the flavour choice players had previously though, and I don't think it would've hurt to make it optional.

I guess what I’m getting at is that Familiar abilities are largely there for classes that get familiars. This isn’t an Alchemist specific ability (unless I’m misunderstanding things). So, it shouldn’t be judged solely on whether or not it solves everything for the Alchemist. As a Witch, I might be regularly sending my familiar out anyway. I could have it deliver a healing potion to a downed opponent, and then trigger its ability with a Hex. Or I might need to both deliver an item and sustain a spell.

Alchemists having other ways to do their thing is fine. And maybe this isn’t worth the investment for them. It doesn’t mean that the Familiar ability is useless for everyone or that Paizo made some mistake with the way they constructed it.

For sure, it's a broader ability, and (presumably) anyone with a familiar can take it, and everyone can judge based on their needs and use cases. Since this is a thread about Alchemists, though, I don't think it's unreasonable for people here to judge it specifically from the Alchemist's perspective.

At the risk of opening up another can of worms, is there any formal notion of how much bulk a familiar can carry? I would think they'd have the same bulk rules as other Tiny creatures, but their lacking a defined Str makes the bulk calculation awkward. Valet and Toolbearer both restrict them to dealing with items of Light bulk, but you can argue those are for more specific balance reasons.

This one's inspired by the annoyance of Toxicologist wanting to have a reusable melee weapon, but Double Brew wanting you to have both hands free. If you've got an Independent+Manual Dexterity familiar you can have them take or return your weapon for free 1/turn, but I'm wondering whether there are any limits on how heavy those weapons can be.

(The other options I can see are to invest in Str (expensive) for the free-hand Spiked Gauntlet, invest in Monk archetype (expensive) for the free-hand finesse Tekko-Kagi, or buy a weapon harness and strap a dagger to your wrist, dropping it for Double Brew then spending the action to regrasp it when you next need it (cheap but costs more actions).)

Wouldn't the advantage of sending your familiar to deliver an item be that you have one action left to do something else?

If you deliver the item, then you 1-action take the item out, 1-action Stride to your ally, 1-action deliver the item.

If your familiar delivers it, then you 1-action take the item out, 1-action command the familiar, and still have 1 action left for whatever (Throw a bomb or whatever you want). Sure, your familiar is a move action away, but if you needed/wanted to do anything other than deliver the item that round, you have an action to do it.

I don't disagree that it's weird that your familiar can feed someone else an elixir, but it can't feed it to you, but just in terms of why you would want to use the ability, it does get you an extra action that round compared to delivering it yourself, and sometimes that matters.

I'll admit, I'm not super familiar with Alchemists currently, so maybe I'm missing something obvious. If I understand the new familiar ability correctly, it's not limited to Alchemists, and I can see my Witch making use of it in some situations.

That's the basic value offer, as far as I can see. (Though you probably make the item with Quick Alchemy rather than drawing it.) You've then got 1 action left to do something else, e.g. make a 0 MAP strike or use a second item you made with Double Brew. You can then either leave your familiar sitting in the middle of nowhere, or spend an extra action on a later turn to call it back, so it's overall more flexible.

As I understand, the issue people have been debating is whether that's worth the investment of a class feat and the risk of getting your familiar attacked as it walks about. If your ally has a hand free, is able to act, and doesn't need the item's effect before the start of their next turn, you can just chuck the item to them for another 2+1 action split that needs no investment and doesn't stop working for a week because a purple worm ate it.

The condition removals that need to be applied mid combat are probably better delivered by a Chirurgeons special abilities.

The Chirurgeon doesn't have any ranged abilities to deliver general condition removal, afaik. Their field vial action just does chip healing and can reroll a Will save with feat investment, and Healing Bomb only works on Elixirs of Life, and since it's Additive you can't use the other Additive feats that let you add bonus condition removal to your healing elixirs.

How do versatile vials work for the Investigator alchemical sciences field? Do they still recover 2 every 10 minutes?

I've not been looking much at the new Investigator, but to my knowledge it's pretty much the same. They haven't been given regenerating vials, but they haven't been given the associated 10min duration limit either. No big surprise, since vial regeneration is such a powerful feature.

No.

It is a core rule, with the text being as insistent on giving as hard a no as I have ever seen.

Ah, sorry, I did in fact miss your post. Thanks for pointing me in the right direction. I spotted the posts about the word-of-god videos and assumed they were citing the best source we had.

That is a pretty definitive statement, with the best counterargument I can think of being that it may have a more narrow intended interpretation based on its presence in the Companion Items section, full of permanent worn items with activations that the PC has to take instead. There's also the possible specific-over-general of Manual Dexterity, though there's room for ambiguity there. (Or there's the fact that your pet monkey is unable to feed itself your journeybread, and will now sadly starve to death.)

But then again, if you've got a designer asserting the stricter interpretation, then yeah that's fair evidence of RAI matching.

While GMs are free to say that's dumb, even I acknowledge how serious of an explosion of power it would be for familiars to do. One need only gesture at things like Oil of Haste, Necklace of Fireballs, etc.

I confess I'm not convinced at a glance that a class feat giving you two "free" preselected consumable activations per fight would be gamebreaking, though I appreciate that it may be outside of typical design specifications and need closer examination. Though, eliminating the draw costs of two preselected consumables via familiar hand-off is apparently fine?

I’ll add you to the “mad” column.

Not so much mad as surprised that people were claiming "RAW" off a video. Which, it turns out, they were not. My bad for responding too quickly.

So it's not so much "rules as written", but "rules as based on what a dev said one time, based on nothing written prior, and henceforth passed down as verbal tradition"? That's, uh... well, it's something. I guess you can call it RAI, though I'd be more convinced it's rules as intended and not just a misspeak if they took the time to write it down anywhere. Maybe if they'd had a project where they revised and republished all their core rules...?

Btw, half of the worries I had about Action Efficiency are mitigated by the new familiar ability "item delivery"

with a command (so 1 action): the familiar takes an item you are holding, use a move action to get to a target, and then gives the item to the target OR administers the item.

the poison familiar ability also helps, but not as impressive: doesn't require command, is just a single interact, so it can be done with Independent, and basically applies an injury poison you had prefilled it with to an ally's blade (I guess here a familiar's ally, so that would include you, but the wording may imply that for some reason the familiar can only poison your ally's weapons and not yours, not sure about that)

that said, here we go again having a familiar being kinda mandatory if you're not a bomber as a negative, but at least action efficiency is now very good.

In terms of action compression, the delivery service doesn't sound too impressive. Lab Assistant + Manual Dexterity already lets a familiar make + admninister elixirs for 1 action, or... hm. I wanted to say that they can make + chuck the item to someone else with Interact, but the Interact action says you "typically" need to pass a DC 15 ranged attack roll for that. Familiars are Pets, and Pets can't make Strikes. However, it's just a raw attack roll, not a Strike action (you're not trying to deal damage). However however, the familiar doesn't have an attack modifier, so it's going to have a hard time actually making the DC. (Even for PCs, does an attack roll interact with MAP if it's not part of an action with the Attack trait?)

That said, I feel like this was probably an oversight, and that a more permissive GM would allow it. Point is, this is competing with existing action compression that's potentially more useful (1A elixirs on yourself and adjacent allies, or 1A make+pass off at some range.)

(I guess this also means a familiar can produce + feed a quick vial to a Mutagenist for 1 action, which makes their drawback suppression only cost 1 action. That makes it a bit more attractive IMO, particularly once it starts giving physical damage resistance. I don't think this works for Toxicologist though, since the familiar doesn't have your 1A weapon poisoning, before you get to whether it's allowed to take the field action at all.)

Overall I don't mind the familiar being a useful action compressor—there should be a reason it's worth taking, after all. Design-wise, it does run into the trouble that it's non-obvious for a new player what the benefits of a familiar might be, and the value also varies strongly on how much your GM ignores familiar targeting/movement/AoE damage in combat.

For Poison Reservoir, I agree that the free poison application is nice, but it's a bit of a one-trick pony as Poison Reservoir + Independent use up both your familiar abilities, leaving it with nothing else to do. ...Also, it requires a poison to be pre-installed in the familiar. Even if you accept that a QA'd poison doesn't disappear at the end of the round once it's been put on a weapon, I think it's harder to argue (RAW at least) that sticking it in a reservoir to change its activation preserves it. That means you'd need to make it with AA, which loses you the damage-on-save additive feat effect.

This brings up a wider point. There are a bunch of alchemical permanent items that work by loading in an alchemical consumable, sometimes two of the same consumable, to fuel an activation later in the day. Previously, this just meant that you made the items during daily prep and loaded them, then used it as needed. All good, it costs you 0.5 or 1 of your many reagents. Now, however, you only get 8ish stable items per day, so it costs a lot more opportunity-wise to make use of them. (With a couple you can just buy some lv1 bombs from a shop and be fine, but with most it gets more awkward.)

This issue also applies to the Toxi's Lv20 feat Plum Deluge from Fists of the Ruby Phoenix. It requires 3 units of a contact poison, which previously meant 1 of the Toxi's 26+ daily reagents; now it means 3 of your 9+ daily AA items.

Dont't forget the Coffee, a vitally important staple for all the Agents of Edgewatch ;)

We can't let the Investigators know that we can make coffee, they'll never leave us alone if we do!

QVs are NOT a substitute for a weapon. They can never benefit from runes. The moment Double Brew becomes available at L9, weapons will already be getting their elemental Property runes.

Are they not? I think that they make going without a weapon a legitimate possibility, at least if you're not a Toxicologist. The splash damage puts them ahead of other simple options innately, and that's before adding Quick Bomber's action economy. Maybe you can do a bit better by investing in Str and a bunch of weapon upgrades, but this is Alchemist, their normal weapon attacks suck compared to martials. They'd rather be doing anything else, it's just before they didn't have anything else. And I'd rather spend that weapon upgrade money elsewhere.

As long as your table is OK with legacy content, you can still take Calculated Splash for +2 or +3 to splash damage, and Expanded Splash is still available at higher levels to boost bomb splash further. Friendly fire is a worry for non-bombers, but Directional Bombs can control that while letting you further exploit the AoE, or you can just use some of the money you saved on not buying weapon runes to buy some Backfire Mantles.

I won't deny that there's jank here, particularly with Double Brew + Quick Bomber strongly favouring 2x free hands for action economy, but the QV bombs feel like a serious leg-up and something the Alchemist really needed. There are issues with how the benefits are spread across the research fields, but it's still very nice for everyone to have IMO.

This change of the "1A elixir" method into a 2A routine also prevents me from using it alongside cantrips or any 2A option anymore.

Can't you still get a familiar with manual dexterity + lab assistant to QA and administer/pass an elixir on your behalf? I appreciate that shifting away from prepped items has weakened a bunch of action savers, but I feel like elixirs is one place that hasn't been hit so hard.

Okay I think I get that now thank you

I think you may have also missed that Double Brew isn't a feat; it's a class feature, so every Alchemist gets it for free. The old Alchemist had it too, so I expect people are talking like everyone's familiar with it already.

Double Brew is also a lot more versatile than just throwing bombs. As long as you have both hands free, it bumps the number of any alchemical consumables you can create and use per turn from 1 to 2 (assuming they both take 1 action to use). Bombs, elixirs, mutagens, quick vials, smokescreens, glowsticks, cake, salad, ice cream, whatever.

I don't think this has been linked yet: a video from BadLuckGamer giving more a more systematic coverage of the changes. In particular, starting halfway through you've got a more thorough go-through of all the new/changed feats, rather than just highlights.

There are a couple of things I hadn't seen elsewhere, like a Level 2 Additive feat that lets QA poisons do their item level as damage if the target succeeds their initial save. (Any poison, not just injury poisons.) But more than any one thing, it's nice to have a more comprehensive video that doesn't seem likely to have missed anything big. (I'll still want the full text in front of me before figuring out finicky stuff, like whether you can draw a versatile vial from your toolkit as part of using a field vial action.)

I've got the screenshot open in front of me, and the specific language is:
- Infused poisons can ignore poison immunity
- If it would be more beneficial for you (GM call, typically due to weaknesses or resistances), your infused poisons can instead deal acid damage instead of poison damage

Their field vials also get the choice to do poison damage if you want to, and can poison a weapon or piece of ammo to deal the initial damage of the vial as an injury poison (later they also take persistent damage equal to the splash damage). Later they get poison resistance (half level), and finally they get the ability to potentially poison two enemies from one strike; when someone fails a save against one of your infused injury poisons, you can choose for it to spray to an adjacent creature, who is also exposed (but you can't do this a 2nd time for 3 targets).

Thaks for this. Ignoring poison immunity is really nice, of course, particularly when there were some poisons that did other damage types but were still blocked by immunity due to their trait. Depending on the wording it might extend to skunk bombs too.

Poison vial bombs probably won't shake things up too much, but it's nice synergy with the poison resistance to be able to bomb a target without splashing yourself.

Do you know what the action economy on the vial-poisoned weapon is like? If it's the full bomb damage I doubt they'll be letting us pre-buff a bunch of weapons with it, but it'll be interesting to see how much of an edge it has over just bombing the target (at least until you get the persistent damage perk).

The final part sounds a lot a better version of the Chemical Contagion feat. It's nice to see them free up some of that feat space, as well as maybe tune things up since it was pretty situational before.

As a side note, everything that has come out is such a huge boost for alchemists that I am honestly shocked to see a bunch of the negativity on this thread.

Speaking only for myself here: I'm well aware that Alchemist has its problems, but in playing it I've grown attached to the few high points or funny pranks it gets. So when a rebuild comes out that makes things overall a lot better but means that my fond memories are now stuck in the past, it's bound to feel bittersweet.

Give me some time with the full text and I'm sure I'll come to a new understanding eventually, and find myself looking back in horror at how bad things used to be.

On the rules front, there's nothing saying what can or can't happen between the reload actions and actually attacking with the weapon, where you'd expect any restrictions to be mentioned. But that's just omission, so for some explicit points: the Gunner's Bandolier has an activation that leaves you with a loaded firearm or crossbow stowed in the bandolier, and the Drow Shootist archetype gives you a quick draw-style action that lets you draw and shoot a hand crossbow in the same action.

More vaguely, you also have that the Gunslinger has Quick Draw as a class feat while being built for the use of firearms and crossbows. If that doesn't work with their main weapons, that's an exceptionally cruel trick on Paizo's part. Similar goes for all the Initial Deeds letting you draw your weapon when rolling initiative—if that weapon is expected to be unloaded, it would have been worth a clarifying note at the very least.

So on the rules/mechanical front, keeping your worn weapons loaded looks to be allowed. Or at least it is for the major groups of crossbow + firearm, but there's nothing to suggest we should discriminate between other types of reloading weapon.

In terms of flavour: since a sling is pretty much just a leather pouch with two bits of rope attached, I think it would be pretty easy to keep it pre-loaded. Just tuck the folded pouch into a belt or pocket with the ropes coiled up next to it, and you can grab everything easily then let the pouch fall to a resting position, ready to go.

I agree with people who say shoving a loaded crossbow into your pocket is a very bad idea for everyone involved, but given that it's got explicit mechanical support I would be happy to hand-wave that you've e.g. got the bolt tucked under the string and you pull back the string as part of your draw action. You can't do that with a real crossbow, but then you can't reload a real crossbow in 2 seconds either.

The Dual Onslaught feat from the Dual-Weapon Warrior archetype reads

When you lash out with both weapons, you leave no room for the target to escape your attack. When you use Double Slice, if you miss with both Strikes, choose one of the two weapons and apply the effects of a hit with that weapon. You can't choose a weapon if your attack roll with that weapon was a critical failure, meaning you still miss entirely if both attack rolls were critical failures.

Suppose you’re an Investigator who just rolled a 3 on Devise a Stratagem, or an Alchemist who really wants this next bomb to land. While this feat is meant to support dual-wielding, as written there’s nothing stopping you from burning an extra action on Double Slice to make your first hit almost certain to land… as long as you can make sure your second hit is a miss.

I’m not aware of anything in the rules that lets you deliberately fail an attack roll. (Why would there be? Normally, if you don’t want to hit you just don’t attack.) However, you can still pick a secondary weapon that minimises the odds of landing a hit. Ideally something you don’t have proficiency in, but failing that you can stack non-agile + no runes + shoddy + non-lethal attack + using lower of Str/Dex for a really pitiful modifier.

It’s mechanically sound, but now we’ve got a situation where your character earnestly decided that making a swing with the wrong end of a flickmace was the best thing to do, and that this somehow pays off in securing their other hit. It's an odd image, to say the least.

Firstly, am I reading this right? Secondly, if so, what do you think the appropriate response to this setup is?

Personally, I’m not sure whether it’s better to take it as supported by the rules and streamline by allowing an auto-miss (call it a telegraphed blow to draw the enemy guard, say), disallow it as clearly unintended behaviour, or make the player play it as written and explain what exactly they are doing with that tactical toothbrush.